


I'm not a saint, but I could be if I tried

by AtticusFinchTheLegend



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy/Nile if you squint, Betrayal, Booker gets a little Andy backstory as a treat . . . no as a punishment, Booker sad boy hours, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Mentioned Quynh | Noriko, Multi, Qunyh/Andy if you squint, introspective, these are my support metaphors sir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtticusFinchTheLegend/pseuds/AtticusFinchTheLegend
Summary: “Betrayal isn’t one big decision, it’s a bunch of little ones, each under a different name.” Andy murmured.orBooker and Andy have a Discussion, and Andy unearths old family grievances
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 14
Kudos: 57





	I'm not a saint, but I could be if I tried

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song, "I'm not a saint," by Billy Raffoul. If you've never heard it, I highly recommend giving it a listen!

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried. 

There had been time for talk, many times. To the empty space of his room, mostly to the empty space in his head. Where words could be bred and born and killed and erased within the span of a breath and a sigh. He knew, even when these plans were rolling out freshly printed and warm in the heat of his shame, that it was safer to argue in thought rather than in ink. Even paper torn and shredded could still hold some message, and Booker- remembering a time when words had formed a verdict and a noose- no longer considered himself lucky enough to tempt fate. 

But he had tried, and the worse part was that it wasn’t the mercy of Nile, or the calm hurt of Nicky, not even the glares Joe kept pinning to his back that hurt the most. It wasn’t even Andy, who hadn’t said a word since they got in the car, her eyes trained on the road but her gaze blank in a way that left them both empty. 

The worst part was Merrick. 

He was probably still back where they had left him, speared through, and buoyed on a bed of metal. His body warped and broken. His face a death mask of fear. 

He was lifeless, blissfully lifeless. 

He was something Booker could only dream of and despite the fractures, the betrayal; despite the fact that no one was looking him in the eye, or that he was feeling the most alone he ever had since he woke up, tangled in rope- cold but not because of the snow around him- there was no keeping the pure envy that spread under his skin like the world’s most potent poison. 

A poison that he had put in his own drink and thrown back like liquor.

And by the time it burned the back of his throat he was gone. 

At this point, he wasn’t even registering the gradual descent of the buildings outside as they blurred from skyscrapers into apartment buildings into single-family homes. The city faded behind him as if it had never really been there to begin with. The ghost of this day was suspended, like the faces of his sons, his wife, in a mind too tired to remember and too scared to forget. 

Andy still hadn’t said anything to him. 

From what he could see in the rearview mirror she hadn’t even spared him a glance, eyes still fixed in the distance and glazed over with that same hollow look. Her hands clenched the steering wheel with a white-knuckle grip that climbed up her arm like a stiff vine, wrapping around her torso and turning her from the waist up into a breathing statue. If he squinted, he could almost mistake the  
blood she wore for rust, worn and aged whether she was made of flesh or metal.

Booker knew that there were things going on around him. Slight flashes of Nile in his periphery, the subtle shifting of Joe to his right, movement he could feel rather than see. 

And, while it had always been a reflex to turn towards motion, whether it was to dodge a fist or to seek out an ally, he didn’t look at them. His head leaned against the cool glass of a window instead.  
There was a pull, though, a draw, that left him with a gaze unfocused but tethered, tied like loose rope to the only person in the car who remained stagnant. 

Still and static like metal.

He wondered idly what it meant to be seeking steel where there was only flesh.

The England safehouse was an old cottage situated just on the edge of Avebury, a small town that had a higher population of sheep than it did people. They had used it less than a handful of times since Booker joined, two centuries of traveling together being mainly focused on jobs rather than leisure, and up until now there hadn’t been a real reason to take a break other than just being tired. But this time there was an exhaustion, something bone-deep now settled in all of them. 

Andy had driven them through the night, challenging the arguments from her three passengers, and ignoring the silence from her fourth. By the time they reached the circling fields, the sun had been a rising blip on the horizon, soft shades of pink emanating from it and seeping into night blue. The whole sky in turn had been transformed into a yielding violet, not yet day and no longer night. 

The world seemed to be stuck in transition. Between light and dark, enemy and friend.

There had been silence for most of the ride and as Andy pulled into the driveway there were still no words said. Even Nile, new as she was, had sensed the tension in the car and kept her questions- despite there being an obvious many of them- to herself. When they were fully parked and no one exited, she awkwardly glanced from the safehouse to Andy as if seeking some hidden permission.

She didn’t find it.

When no one moved for another minute, Nicky sighed tiredly and pushed his door open. He got out of the car with measured motions, almost mechanical, and walked towards the cottage as if he were calculating each step he took; it made Booker’s heart clench painfully, reminding him of all the times he had seen that walk. It had always held a hanging sadness, trailing after every failed mission involving children, every lost innocent; it was the careful gait of a priest with too much empathy in a world much too harsh. And this time, Booker knew he had caused it.

Before following Nicky, Joe reached over to the front console and patted Nile’s arm, wordlessly pointing to the cottage. She nodded and began to unfasten her seatbelt. 

Andy still hadn’t moved. Her hands kept holding the wheel in a death grip, so tightly that Booker was sure there would be indents in the leather where her nails had dug in.  
When the door to Nile’s side popped open, he expected her to leave immediately, go to the cottage, escape whatever special hell Booker had created for himself and Andy. Instead, she paused. The door leaned lightly on her arm, propped up against her as she slowly reached out and ran her hand gently over the ridges of Andy’s knuckles. Her touch was something quiet, something strangely warm that had a heat even Booker could feel seated behind them. Andy didn’t relax, her torso still a victim to some unseen suffocation. And, her hands didn’t move from the wheel, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, the glaze of her eyes seemed to subside, as if after being stuck in a fog for so long, the sun was finally able to pierce through and show—prove that the darkness would not last forever, that being lost would not last forever. In a touch so simple, so instinctual, there was light. And, Booker could see it, at least a glimpse of it, and he knew Andy could feel it. 

But, it wasn’t enough. And, they both knew that.

Nile pulled her hand back and rested it lightly on the console between them, an invitation, a request, an offer. Outside, the beginnings of morning were slowly being consumed by a dreary grey, hopeful pink running and diluting like watered down paint. 

Andy didn’t move her hands from the steering wheel.

Wearing an expression that Booker had only seen in his dreams: unsurprised, disappointed, but concerned overall, a memory of a memory dressed in iron and salt, Nile slowly took her hand back. She sighed and climbed out of the car. It took only a few steps, a delayed hesitation at the door, before she, and anything relating to the small comfort Booker felt in his chest became hidden by a wall – one of cobblestone, and another of his own making.

Joe had already popped his door open and stepped out. He lingered for a moment, unusually quiet as he stared at them, Andy specifically. 

With a scoff, he shot a look at Booker and left. It was a look that Nicky would have recognized, despite the centuries since he had seen it, locked on him across a desert of sand and violence; it was one that spoke of enemy lines and bloodshed, betrayal and disillusionment. It was a look that Booker knew would haunt him-- was haunting him, sidled alongside the steps of Atlas, and a light murdered by the darkness in his own head.

They sat there for a while, listening to the patter of rain as it fell gently on the car, scattered and light in the early morning. The heater was off, and while it was still technically summer, early autumn winds and the rain outside cooled the interior until all Booker could think about was the silence and the chill. 

“Did I ever tell you about my mother?”

Andy sighed deeply, tiredly. She ran her hands repetitively over the steering wheel as if she were warming it up. There was a moment where she let her words sit and settle. They hung suspended, wearing the skin of a question, but Booker didn’t say anything. He knew he wasn’t meant to.

“She wasn’t mine by birth, but she was in every way that mattered. She took me in when there was no one else to.” Andy shifted slightly, just enough so that Booker could see the side of her face. She said softly, “It always kind of reminded me of us. Finding you. Training you. She taught me everything I know of war,” Andy scoffed, “told me I was going to be some ‘great leader’ one day.”

“Andy-”

She didn’t need to move, didn’t need to speak. He went quiet at the tense line of her back, the sharp set of her jaw. It was like there was something hard beneath her skin, inhumanly still and dense.  
Like stone. 

Like metal.

“Most of my life was spent training. Just getting better, needing to get better.” Andy turned forward again, and Booker felt a brief pang of loss as her face disappeared from view. “I needed to feel I deserved the pride she had for me. That I had earned it somehow. It wasn’t long before I surpassed my sisters.” She sighed, but there was no exhaustion to it, just a sense of hollowness that seemed to echo from the base of her throat, as if it came from her very core. “Shit, it was expected. I don’t put a lot of stock in destiny, not like Nicky does, but I can remember how it felt, believing that I was born for something. Some people find that—that sense of knowing in art, science, even in other people, but I found it in blood. Victory and blood.” 

Booker shifted in his seat. Something like fear began to curl in his stomach, tentative and new, like the faint beginnings of an alarm. And, for the first time in his life, this dread wasn’t found at the end of a gun, or at the sight of a rope tied neatly into a haunted memory, it was found in this vacant shell in front of him. It was found in the way his hand shook as it rested on the handle beside him, and in the knowledge that if Andy did choose to lunge at him, to find herself in his blood, he wouldn’t fight back, wouldn’t flee. 

He had already run from so much in this life, had dodged so many punishments only to be met with something worse on the other side of them. 

He couldn’t do it anymore.

“Betrayal isn’t one big decision, it’s a bunch of little ones, each under a different name.” Andy murmured. “Jealousy, grief, pride. Resentment. She felt—threatened, by me. She was scared, and that fear became a decision became a resentment became an infection. It consumed her, Book. And, I didn’t even know she was sick with it until I felt it stabbing me in the chest.” 

Outside, the rain grew heavier.

“I didn’t know until I felt it shoot me in the stomach.”

Booker reached towards the back of her chair, but his hand remained suspended in the air between them. He didn’t know what he intended to do. He knew he couldn’t touch her, not now and probably never again.

“I tried.” He said, but Andy spoke louder.

“You know, it’s almost funny,” She said in a rush, the words tumbling out of her like ice cubes, each one more cold and frantic than the last. “she killed me first, and you almost killed me last. That’s got to be a point for destiny, or at least for some form of cosmic irony from whatever sick fuck’s playing the board-”

“I tried, Andy.”

She stilled, and when she spoke it was if her tongue had been traded for a razor. “Tried what, Booker?”

“Everyday. I tried every day to talk myself out of it.” And this feels important, monumental, but for some reason each syllable sounds lacking to him. A feeble excuse. He’d always been good at those. “I didn’t want it. Andy, I didn’t let it infect me. It just . . . did. No matter how hard I tried. It just did.”

It was the echo of his son’s death that drowned out each rebuttal. It was the reminder of his wife’s kiss that made it too easy to pick Joe and Nicky out as the first targets. 

Sitting motionless, holding onto his explanation the way Andy held onto the wheel in front of her. It was the chill that made him think of sterile lab equipment and the silence that made him all too aware of how unforgiving metal could be.

Andy’s body began to unravel. The vine around her had snapped, and she slumped forward. A puppet without its strings, a person whose grief had transformed from a runway into quicksand.  
“I believe you. But it doesn’t make any of this better, you’ve got to know that.” She looked up into the rear-view mirror. For the first time since they left Merrick Pharmaceuticals, her eyes met his, and she saw him. “Tell me you know that.”

He nodded, silent.

The gesture seemed to have spoken enough for her, because Andy didn’t push for any vocal admission. Her gaze slid from his. 

As if it caused her physical pain, Andy forced her hands to relax enough to finally let go of the wheel. She reached to the door beside her and held its handle in a light grip.  
“Oh, Book, you tried. But it wasn’t enough.” She popped her side open and began to step out. The rain washed over her, the rust of her blood streaming down onto the driveway, revealing skin pink and flushed, soft and vulnerable.

“I wish it had been enough.”

And, as he sat there, as cold and alone as he was when he had first entered this life, Booker couldn’t decide whether “enough” had been a wish for his death or hers.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was my first ever "finished" fanfic! I hope to write more for this fandom, as well as dip into a few of my other ones. 
> 
> I've only recently started sharing my writing, and I'm still a little hesitant, but I feel like putting my work out there is something I need to do in order to get better, you know? 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
